Nintendo’s Emulation Secret Revealed
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 02/15/15 at 02:11 PM CT
The friendly hackers of GBAtemp have, once again, laid bare the inner workings of a Nintendo gaming platform. Where Team Twiizers opened up the original Wii to homebrew and emulation via their fantastic Homebrew Channel, a homebrewer named Smealum is responsible for opening up the 3DS.
However, what is the most interesting about the news of the 3DS being hacked isn’t the fact that it is now possible to run homebrew on Nintendo’s latest handheld (provided one refrains from ever downloading official updates again). Instead it is the newfound knowledge that Nintendo has fully-functional emulators and has been holding out on us.
When the Virtual Console first launched on the Wii, many people assumed that instead of a garden variety emulator, such as the ones that have been floating around the Internet for over a decade, old games sold via the VC were encased in a custom wrapper that allowed them to work with new hardware. That illusion has been stripped away with the revelation …
Come Join the New MeltedJoystick Steam Group!
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 02/06/15 at 03:07 PM CT
With the massive disappointment of the nascent 8th Gen consoles and the massive improvements PC gaming has experienced over the course of the last 8 years, the MeltedJoystick crew has found ourselves moving from apathy or outright hostility toward PC gaming to picking Steam as our preferred platform for most things “AAA” and Indie. With the surge of PC game reviews coming from Chris and myself, it only makes sense for MeltedJoystick to jump on-board with Steam’s new game curation program.
Anyone with a MeltedJoystick profile can request to join the MeltedJoystick Crew Steam group and participate in discussions and heated banter (just send Chris a Private Message). Those without a profile can still follow MeltedJoystick as a Steam Curator in order to see our latest Steam recommendations as we review them. MeltedJoystick members who write Steam game reviews of a high enough quality to win the Featured User Review slot in our quarterly Review Roundups will also have the …
Backlog: The Embiggening - February, 2015
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 02/01/15 at 02:52 PM CT
Winter is almost over, and the money-spending rush of Holiday Season 2014 is long behind us. It’s February, and gamers who even bothered to make New Year’s Resolutions have probably abandoned them by now. What about the developers and publishers, though? Well, if they resolved to make more crap, then they’re doing a great job of keeping up!
The shovelware is beginning to creep back into production. Fortunately, it isn’t quite in deluge amounts, yet. February is bringing the world both “Spongebob Heropants” (to tie-in with the upcoming live-action/CG ‘Spongebob’ movie) and a new ‘Dragon Ball Z’ game (because ‘Dragon Ball’ fans just never get tired of it, apparently).
In the realm of ports, “Dynasty Warriors 8 Empires” for PS4 and XBONE has been delayed until this month (who knows, maybe it will get delayed again!), PC is getting “MX vs. ATV: Supercross,” and Nintendo is porting one of the worst ‘Zelda’ games to the 3DS.
Coincidentally, in …
Microsoft Impresses with Windows 10 Event; Not with Xbox
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 01/25/15 at 02:05 PM CT
On Wednesday, January 21, Microsoft played host to tech writers and enthusiasts at a special Windows 10 event in the company’s hometown of Redmond. While it is unsurprising that the Xbox console brand wouldn’t receive much attention at an event specifically focused on the launch of a new version of the operating system that runs 90% of the world’s computers, what is surprising is just how many amazing things MS revealed with regard to the new Windows.
The first shocker announced at the Windows 10 event is that the new OS will be a free upgrade for users of Windows 7 and Windows 8.x for the first year after launch. Giving away the new OS for free is huge, and an even bigger move in the direction of consumer friendliness than when MS sold Windows 8 for a hefty discount for a time after it was released. Plenty of paranoid folks have raised questions about whether or not this free upgrade period is just a way to draw customers into a trap and start charging them an Office …
GOG Galaxy Client Begins Limited Alpha Testing, Looks Promising
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 01/17/15 at 04:29 PM CT
Back in June, our friends in Poland, CD Projekt, announced that they were beginning work on an integrated – but still fully optional – gaming client for their wildly popular GOG.com DRM-free game shop. After months of distressing silence, GOG Galaxy has finally reached Alpha status and excited GOG.com members can get into the queue for an Alpha key by signing up here.
I got my Galaxy Alpha key this past week and had the opportunity to take the new client for a test drive. While it is still clearly an Alpha piece of software, this early state mainly comes across due to the fact that Galaxy is not currently feature complete by any stretch of the imagination. The current Galaxy Alpha (version 0.2.2.662) only includes the core features of shopping the GOG.com website and downloading/updating games in a user’s library. Fortunately, the GOG website loads quickly in the Galaxy browser and the games I tested with the Galaxy downloader worked flawlessly.
There are still rough …
Internet Archive Liberates Thousands of DOS Games – Someone Needs to Register BOG.com
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 01/10/15 at 04:07 PM CT
The Internet Archive, also known as “The Wayback Machine,” started archiving retro videogames in 2013 and making them available via in-browser streaming. What started with ROMs for ancient consoles and arcade machines has now spread into the realm of old DOS games formerly dominated by GOG.com, the Polish company formerly known as Good Old Games and owned by ‘The Witcher’ franchise developer, CD Projekt.
I am a huge proponent of archiving old games and making them available for free to a modern audience for posterity’s sake. However, unlike old console games, where the emulators have been rock solid for years, DOS emulation is still a bit of a black art. I’m not sure if the Internet Archive is truly up to the task of maintaining such a library. When GOG.com started selling old, out-of-print DOS games online, they only picked the best of the best and made sure each title was in full working order via DOSbox emulation before presenting them to the public. Without …
Backlog: The Embiggening - January, 2015
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 01/03/15 at 01:19 PM CT
Welcome to another look into the near future. The sad, sad year of 2014 has come grinding to a close. While I’m sure some deluded folks will look back on it fondly, the first year for the PS4 and XBONE (and the second year for the WiiU) featured a lot of blandness, rehashing, and no good reasons to commit to any of the three 8th Gen platforms.
Will 2015 change gaming’s current dismal tone? Maybe… but certainly NOT in January! In our 2015 month of missed deadlines and overdue holiday releases, we have a whopping SIX games to look forward to… and by ‘look forward to,’ I mean ‘completely ignore.’
January will be our second month in a row with no shovelware. That’s good! Shovelware never really does anything but pad release numbers with terrible licensed schlock.
Unfortunately, without the looming specter of shovelware, the entirety of the January 2015 lineup looks to be multi-platform releases and ports.
The three 8th Gen platforms that matter to the …
Year in Review: 2014
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 12/28/14 at 01:41 PM CT
2014 was a long and painful road to travel. While normally I like to look at five spectacular wins and five epic fails during my end-of-year retrospective, 2014 didn’t actually have any wins. Instead, it was a year of epic failures, topped-off with a sugary coating of missed deadlines and unmet expectations. It has been one of the most dire years for gaming since 1983!
Fails
5. Facebook Buys Oculus Rift, Kickstarters Kicked to the Curb
For a while there, it looked like virtual reality was going to be the 8th Generation’s gimmick, what with Sony working on Project Morpheus and the Oculus Rift getting huge Kickstarter support to bring VR to the PC. Unfortunately, instead of sticking with their Kickstarter backers, Oculus decided to take some Big Evil Corporate money when Mark Zuckerberg’s Lovecraftian tentacle monster, Facebook, bought the VR startup. Now, not only did all of that Kickstarter money, which was ostensibly going to Oculus, end up in Facebook’s pockets, but …
Sony: Letting the Terrorists Win
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 12/20/14 at 04:04 PM CT
The news has exploded recently with the revelation that Sony Pictures had their online infrastructure infiltrated by a group of hackers working on behalf of North Korea. The hack came in response to Sony’s formerly-upcoming release of “The Interview” in theatres, which has been canceled in the wake of the cyber-attacks.
This most recent hit against Sony Pictures is just part of a long history of shoddy cyber-security and network infrastructure on Sony’s behalf. Gamers will recall in particular when PlayStation Network was hacked offline for weeks back in 2011. Coupled with PSN’s generally sluggish nature and frequent outages, one wonders if Sony really has any business putting as much of their stuff in the Cloud as they are.
But the worst part of Sony’s response to the North Korea-sponsored hit on their servers is that they chose now to give-in to the hackers. Cyber-security experts are warning that the hack against Sony is the first in what will become a new wave …
Nintendo Attempts to Subvert the ROM-Hack Community with “Mario Maker.”
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 12/14/14 at 01:21 AM CT
The fan communities of ROM-Hackers who take existing games and transform them into new experiences to be played via emulators have long been at odds with the companies that sell the base games that are the hackers’ medium. Between Square Enix shutting down the likes of “Chrono Trigger: Crimson Echoes” and “Chrono Resurrection,” and Nintendo ruffling its feathers over the fanslation of “Mother 3,” as well as completely original fangames like “Metroid: SR388,” “The Legend of Zelda: Outlands,” and “Super Mario Bros. X,” to name a few, it’s clear that these companies perceive their games only as products to be controlled and not the cultural phenomena they actually are.
While Nintendo may say that they don’t want to shut-down projects made by fans out of love for their IPs, very few of these projects manage to avoid being hit with cease and desist orders. Nintendo purports to only throw the book at fangame projects that don’t treat the source material …
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